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Saturday, March 06, 2010

The Raw Deal website joins Glen Beck in the new red baiting campaign

By史蒂夫 奥托

The good news is that more conservative web sites are beginning to recognize the existence of an actual Marxist left in the US. The bad news is that they plan to link the real communist with people who are not communist at all. It’s a new attempt at modern McCarthiesm. As for the attacks on real Marxist, for some reason the focus seems to be on Jed Brandt, who is part of the Brecht Forum. This time the attack is coming from The Raw Deal, a blog run by Nathan R. Jessup. According to a recent post:

“Unfortunately, Jed Brandt, the Communist threat to America, and the Socialist agenda are all very real threats facing our precious nation. Exposing a radicals like Brandt is the first step in preservation. Oh, one last thing: is it coincidence that his radical ideas came from Chicago?” As stated here earlier this week, Glen Beck used the same YouTube clip to insight his viewers of a communist conspiracy. Brandt was adamant about being a communist. Beck used his speech as a spring board for a new McCarthiest style campaign, dragging out all the old propaganda scare tactics of the cold war era.This campaign has allowed communists, such as those involved in the Kasama Project, to engage people, such as Jessup, in the old capitalism vs. communism debate. For actual communists and socialists this is a welcome change from hearing “communism is dead. No one believes that anymore.” Now the US right is beginning to admit that, as an idea, it is not dead and there are still plenty of Americans who oppose the capitalist system.For liberals, such as Barrack Obama, this is not good news, because the real intent of this new attack is to insist that liberalism of any kind leads to communism. According to Beck, in his video attack on Brandt, any kind of liberalism or progressivism is “baby steps” towards a system that strongly resembles communism and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.This new trend is evident in recent presentations made by leaders of the Republican Party. According to The Wichita Eagle:

“The Republican National Committee is trying to backtrack from a presentation made by its finance director that labeled Democratic leaders as “The Evil Empire” and disclosed plans to scare donors in order to raise money. ...……The presentation also said that small donors are motivated by fear and that the RNC needed to sell them on saving the country from “trending toward socialism.”

The Republican Party, suffering from the label as “The party of no!” is desperate to hold on to their seats in this upcoming election. They have offered no solutions to all the problems this country faces, so they are left with fear mongering. The Republicans seem to want to return to the cold war.

273 comments:

Greeetings Otto. Nice post about this subject. I'd only add that this is a re-packaging of an older idea that was used before, and it's just being picked up by the likes of Beck, and popularized now to greater extents. I speak of this notion that liberalism are all "baby steps' on the goal of communism, etc. Just take a review of the actual beliefs of the John Birch Society. To quote Wikipedia, its founder, "Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to Western Civilization, and liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provided cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with a one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_SocietyAlso, notable, in this outlook promoted by Glenn Beck, is a method of Americentrism. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americentrism

I've been trying to engage a couple of the right wingers at their own site (without much success).

And I'm not really into commentating at Kasama any more because I'm not a big fan of the heavy handed, inconsistent censorship.

But I think the central question is this. Can we engage some of these angry, disaffected Birchers and spin them to the left?

Is there a forum where we can take advantage of some kind of cross fertilization between the extreme right and whatever communist movement exists today?

If you've read Robert Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" you would be discouraged. Altemeyer thinks that a certain percentage of the population is simply incapable of independent thought.

But is it worth going for that 20% or so that's reachable?

The actually liberal Democrats are either very scared of these people or very interested in using them as bogeymen to scare the Democratic party's rank and file into voting for more corporate Democrats.

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